Before a flight from California to Texas last month with the Southwest Airlines, one of the gate employees chose to mock the toddler for her rather unusual name. The employee even uploaded a picture of the boarding pass and posted it on social media, ridiculing Abcde.

Source: Deseret News

The furious mother took to social media calling out the employee and Southwest Airlines for name- shaming her daughter. Mrs Redford also took this opportunity to make this mockery a teaching moment for little Abcde as well as the faulting gate agent.

Name shaming? This Texas woman claims a @SouthwestAir agent made fun of her 5-year-old daughter’s name as they were preparing to board their flight at @JohnWayneAir in Orange County.

Traci Redford responded immediately to the ridicule directed towards her daughter, turning around to say “Hey, if I can hear you, my daughter can hear you. So I’d appreciate if you’d just stop.” The little girl, oblivious to the fun that some people were drawing out of her name asked her mother about the same, to which she got the reply “Not everyone is nice and not everyone is going to be nice and it’s unfortunate.”

Southwest Airlines, however, did issue an apology for the same saying that the said incident does not reflect “the care, respect, and civility” the airline expects of its employees.

However, the issue in question is graver and cannot be resolved of with merely an apology. For much more than it encompasses on paper, the incident is an indicator of how young parents are succumbing to the pressure of catching up to ideals and trends of the society they live in.

Bizarre names have incredibly caught up with parents who choose to go for something unusual when it comes to christening their kids. This appears to be more of a derived ‘tradition’, rather than something that really reflects something specific and genuinely concerned with any set doctrum.

The tendency cannot even be ruled out- for those who consider this kind of uniqueness as a way to elicit appreciation and awe, this perhaps is the most common- and easiest- way out. This works most of the times but only for those who have a pedestal of power to climb on. For the celebs for whom trolls are very much an indispensable part of their publicity and even identity, weird names regularly work in their favor. Not so for the masses, however.

What the children with unusual- rather, unworldly- names turns out to suffer is not so surprising, but it’s a rather sad turn of destiny that very often than not, they end up wallowing in mockery and self pity for no fault of theirs. And call it irony or just a view of how the world largely works, the Southwest flight attendant who ended up mocking an innocent child is only a part of the uglier reality.

We think this is an accurate tweet of the mess of sorts Abcde has gotten into.

Giving your child a dumb name like ABCDE should be considered child abuse because you’re willing to condemn your child to a lifetime of mockery so you can get attention.

This, given the fact that Abcde is only an uncommon name and not the most unheard of in naming history. Even then, the pathos that a child with such an identity will have to bear are too real and depressing. And apart from the fact, that such regrettable names will definitely call on some unwanted attention, even the statistics do not quite favor outrageous names. There appears to be a direct correlation between people with crime records and those with uncanny names. Whether it be mere hypothesis or a result of constant frustration being vented out through socially unacceptable means, this is a situation that mostly needs to be avoided and averted.

Of course, our name and identity are an integral part of our right to live and exist independently, yet when we are under the ambit of social scanners that judge you on every pretext possible, all you can do is tread on the safe path and choose a pretty baby name.